Posted by Teacher Ria in Multimedia Center, Teaching Resources | 0 Comments

Story Stretchers: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

One of my favorite stories for class is The Very Hungry Caterpillar. As I shared in a past post, I once was lucky enough to come across a real caterpillar about the same time we were discussing the story, thus we were able to use it as one great story stretcher. I also was able to use the story as an inspiration for my classroom decoration.

One other story stretcher that you can add to your collection is a video such as this:

For sure, the kids will love this!

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Posted by Teacher Ria in Classroom Escapades, Featured, Lesson Plans, Outside the Classroom, Preschool | 0 Comments

When Nature Has Other Plans

Often times in a preschool teachers life she will find that no matter how well in advance she has planned her lessons, things happen that change the course of this discussion. In my personal experience, this has happened countless times, both for the good and the bad. Sometimes these changes are due to faulty equipment or at times due to a more pressing interest in another topic or stimuli, whatever it is, the teachers job is to adjust to these changes and not get caught up with the “plan”.

When I was starting out, I occasionally struggled with that. It took some time for me to really embrace the idea that no matter what I do or say, if the children are intent on something else, I better just go with it. And what I realized from this is by going with the children’s flow, I would find they learned better and they remembered these lessons even years later.

One example of these sudden changes was when I ran into Mother Nature as I taught my kids about animals and bugs. As part of our Math lesson, I had them go through an investigative bug hunt. The task was for them to look for the plastic bugs and pictures of animals I had hidden around the playground and to count the number of legs these bugs had, then we were to chart this and compare which had more or less . Armed with a magnifying glass and a record sheet, we set out in search for these little critters.

Posted by Teacher Ria in Classroom Escapades | 11 Comments

The Hungry Caterpillar

One of my favorite stories for Circle Time is Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I love how it is so colorful and fun, and that from one story, I can talk about a lot of different concepts ranging from the days of the week to rote counting and even the butterfly’s life cycle. Coincidentally, a few days after I used the story in my toddlers class,  I found a bunch of caterpillars munching on the leaves in a flowering plant (I’m not sure what it’s called, but in Filipino we call it calachuchi). I excitedly took the plant and created a terrarium where my kids could watch the life cycle happen right before their very eyes!